During 1966, the Republican Party launched a largely successful challenge to Lyndon Johnson’s “War on Poverty.” Republican candidates pursued an anti–War on Poverty midterm strategy, which made antipoverty programs the symbol of Great Society liberalism, rather than its more popular programs, such as Medicare or the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. Moreover, in Congress and on the campaign trail, Republicans offered well-crafted alternatives—such as their “Opportunity Crusade”—to offset charges of negativism and elitism that had dogged the Grand Old Party (GOP) since the creation of the New Deal in the 1930s. Significantly, while the War on Poverty survived the year, the Republican minority was unexpectedly successful in making important changes to the Economic Opportunity Act during the antipoverty legislation’s renewal. Overall, the Republican challenge to the War on Poverty in 1966, boded ill for the program’s longevity when the GOP finally secured the levers of power.

This article reconsiders the history of the Community Action Program (CAP). I argue that the CAP is best understood as a bold attempt at administrative experimentation and reform. Using original archival materials, I show that policymakers involved the CAP’s design outlined three models of community action: coordination, collaboration, and mobilization, which communities drew upon when implementing the program. Drawing upon an original dataset of ninety-eight community action agencies (CAAs), this article provides a synthetic assessment of the CAP’s implementation. I show that while the 1967 Green Amendment curtailed the CAP’s experimental and participatory ethos, most CAAs operated relatively harmoniously with local governments and social welfare groups to fight poverty. By looking beyond the dramatic clashes between CAAs and local governments and focusing on the multiple ways in which CAAs seized upon the CAP’s experimental nature, this article provides a more balanced and comprehensive assessment of the CAP’s historical legacy.

The 1960s was a period of political opening for employment policy, when important questions about unemployment and economic insecurity were debated and a number of ambitious policies were enacted. Yet the Great Society’s employment policy agenda was also fundamentally limited in scope; it comprised interventions that reinforced rather than altered existing labor market mechanisms. Previous work suggests that primarily institutional factors were responsible for this constraint. By contrast, I contend that in addition to institutional factors, there was an ideological boundary condition on the era’s employment policy. The Johnson administration’s policymakers conformed to aspects of the liberal tradition in America, which limited policy options as well as the efficiency and efficacy of implemented policy.

Throughout their histories, civil rights organizations have chosen to advocate on behalf of the poor, despite disincentives. This paper examines SNCC's and the NAACP's activities concerning the Economic Opportunity Act during the early and mid-1960s. First, I establish the level of attention SNCC and NAACP devoted to the War on Poverty. Based on analysis of the groups' archives, I find that both groups increased their attention to antipoverty policy during a period when other issues were salient to all African Americans. Second, I assess why these shifts in organizational priorities occurred. My findings indicate that competition among civil rights organizations drove the NAACP and SNCC to commit attention to antipoverty issues, and to focus attention on grassroots organizing concerning the War on Poverty. Differences in the organizations' structures mediated what form this attention would take.